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pythagonrl

If you have a keen eye, you might have noticed a change of advertising on the blog in the last week or two. I had an idea last year that there’s lots of rugby league logos around that go by the wayside and that some might look good on a cap or a t-shirt. I found a print on demand service and taught myself to trace in Illustrator and produced a couple dozen designs from old photos and crappy scans.

I launched pythagord.com (Pythago RD or “pi-thag-ord”) earlier this year and it was extremely well received on Twitter and generated a few sales off the bat. I then sent emails to a dozen clubs to see if anyone was interested in being partners, with me doing all the work and paying a cut to clubs to avoid any potential intellectual property disputes, as well as trying to generate some revenue for them. With any luck, I could ride their coattails and their fans would help turn a profit at some point. I got a nibble from Wests and a very polite no from Glebe (which was fine, as they were pretty much doing the same thing) but otherwise it was met with silence.

It took me a while to realise I wasn’t getting anything back. It took me longer to work out what to do about it and then longer still to actually do anything. I held off on promoting the site in the meantime. I ended up reformatting most of the products to remove references to the original club – except the BRL and QComp club stuff, which should exist anyway and it’s a crime that it didn’t so now it does – but you can find what you’re looking for using the team nickname.

The aim now is to make some return on my investment. In the absence of reliable cooperation from the better known clubs and trying to avoid a minefield of trademark and copyright law, I’d like to expand the offering in these ways. If you:

Know of any rugby league club, whether they be juniors in search of some revenue or seniors with a suitably interesting logo or name, who would like a cost effective, low risk merchandising solution with no minimum orders or stock keeping;

Are a budding or accomplished graphic designer and have some rugby league designs that might look good on a piece of clothing and want to see some royalties;

Produce a podcast or blog and want to sell some t-shirts to sympathetic friends or families to raise some beer money (Sports BFs is already on board)

If you bought something under the impression that a cut would be going to the club, my apologies but they don’t appear to be interested in your money. I gave it to Men of League instead (and matched it with my own money), so if nothing else, some good came out of this:

Also some cool rugby league stuff happened in Barcelona and Blackpool on the weekend but you should already be across that. The vista of rugby league’s future continue to expand despite itself.

National Rugby League

Intrust Super Cup

Magic Round was fun. Do rugby league teams remember fun? I’m not sure all of them do. The ones that attended Magic Round definitely couldn’t avoid it. But don’t take my word for it, let’s hear what the fans had to say:

On the experience

Other than the field goal, there are few more exciting kicking moments in rugby league than the correct execution of a 40/20. The 40/20, meaning that the kick is taken behind the player’s forty metre line, bounces in the field of play and goes into touch inside the opponent’s twenty metre, gives a huge advantage for the kicking team, as it advances the ball forty metres down the field and offers a fresh attacking set.

Introduced in 1997 for the Super League competition and retained for the NRL, the 40/20 doesn’t happen very often. You might see a successful attempt every five to ten games. Indeed, we see more field goals.

Just as a bit of a trivial aside, Daly Cherry-Evans has kicked the most 40/20s in the NRL between 2013 and 2018, with sixteen, or one every 8.8 games he has started. The other players in double digits are Chris Sandow (14), Cooper Cronk (12), Cameron Smith (11) and Blake Green (10). Funnily enough, probable Immortal Johnathan Thurston never kicked a 40/20 in this period.

It’s Magic Round, baby! I am very excited to be attending seven out of the eight games (please just make it eight games in three days next year, preferably aligning with the Labour Day weekend) and we found out this week on NRL.com that Magic Round is staying in Queensland for at least the next two years. Despite protestations for the kind of people who have to be quoted in AlTeRnAtiNg CaPs, this is a good thing.

The idea is for the NRL to sell the event to the highest bidder moving forward, as a diverse revenue stream, but they need to establish the concept in Australia first. Holding it in Brisbane does this because it is an established rugby league market and placates the Queensland government somewhat for not getting the hosting rights to the NRL grand final at any point before the end of time. Attendances are not that important to the overall success of the event because the state government is paying the NRL and the NRL in turn pays the teams for giving up their home games. Nonetheless, 125,000 people are expected, which is roughly 20% more than the eight “host” clubs would normally draw in aggregate.

It’s not being held in Sydney for a couple of obvious reasons:

Why would the Queensland government pay to host an event in Sydney?

Sydney already gets around 100+ NRL games and these are poorly attended compared to non-Sydney matches.

On to the tipping, given that this weekend’s games are being played at one venue, I’ve taken the unprecedented step of manually removing home ground advantage from the tipping systems (even for the Broncos, who technically have an away fixture). The net result is that the team on the left would normally be handed an advantage of 40 to 60 Elo rating points, which translates to about 4% winning percentage for Archimedes and about 6% for Eratosthenes. I made some smaller modifications for Poseidon but did not completely remove the home ground advantage because it would have been too difficult to do for a one-off. xPPG remains unaffected.

By the way, it’s not just your imagination. If you, like me, have been wondering whether rugby league is somewhat lopsided so far this year, I don’t think you’re wrong. In the NRL, there are by some metrics only six teams above average and really only two of those – Souths and Easts – are excelling. I look forward to them not playing a grand final because rugby league is too chaotic to allow that to happen.

Also, Penrith are looking decidedly unhealthy. They are spoon favourites and down on more than a few metrics. That’s quite surprising to see the incumbent NSW halves pairing lead around a team that could be the worst in a league that also contains the Bulldogs, Knights, Broncos and Titans.

The Sunshine Coast Falcons dismantled the Souths Logan Magpies 72-4 to continue their unbeaten run. While the scoreline itself was close but not an actual record, this has promoted the Falcons’ form rating to 1663, which is extremely high. For comparison, think North Queensland Cowboys at the end of the 2015 regular season, heading to their first premiership. The 2016 Dolphins, the 2015-16 Blackhawks and the 2013 Pride hit similar marks but it has been largely unprecedented in the fifteen years priorof the Queensland Cup. I suppose this speaks to a greater disparity in talent across the league that wasn’t present in earlier years, even though those early years often resulted in teams folding after winless seasons, which is something of a paradox that I don’t have a resolution for.

To not put too fine a point on it, the Broncos have been shockingly bad in 2019. Riding the hype train in this year, they were touted as premiership contenders (disclosure: including by me).

The Broncos have won just two games. One was against a Cowboys side that is facing similar struggles and another against a Sharks team bereft of its star power. The other six games have been losses, ranging from a late field goal from Corey Norman sealing the win for the Dragons, to thirty-two point demolitions at the hands of Easts and then again from Souths.

The finger pointing has begun. The Broncos’ extremely youthful pack has come in for criticism, both for a lack of go-forward and a lack of consistency.

The big news of the last couple of days is that Kodi Nikorima is set to leave the Broncos and join the Warriors. Those of us who are Broncos fans are pretty happy about it, although I’d be happier if we were getting one of the Warriors’ three halves in return and not blooding an eighteen year old in his place. A bit of experience combined with some competence (*ahem*Blake Green) wouldn’t go astray at the moment.

Those numbers suggest that he’s fine at what he does, and indeed improving, but he won’t be challenging for a place in the Hall of Fame. I wouldn’t have thought he was even rep material based on his slashline but he is New Zealand’s starting halfback, a position I think he will struggle to hold with the rise of Chanel Harris-Tavita.

That said, he was on a relatively low salary so represented value for money for Brisbane. He would struggle to find a contract under a points-based cap system. Whether he brings that value to Auckland at twice the price for the next three years remains to be seen.